I invested heavily in myself (education). Then I made a number of bets on businesses until I finally managed to sell one that allowed me to buy my house outright and put me near retirement level. I'm 41.

This was pretty stressful and I would only recommend it if you are in your 20's and have plenty of energy and drive to pursue this path. It's not for the faint-of-heart but the payoff is huge if you can stick with it. The more usual (and sane) way is to accumulate wealth slowly and have a steady retirement. Safe and steady, although you probably won't end up "wealthy".

In any case, the strategy you take to attain wealth is definitely not the same strategy you should follow to preserve it.

I would not live my life pursuing a $50 million portfolio. In my opinion, that is the wrong approach. You should pursue happiness and quality of life. Since money can be an important part to that, I suggest you save a high percentage of your salary and pursue making the portfolio as large as you can, but without depriving yourself and your family of the lifestyle that you want have.

In our case, we saved 25+% of our salary for 30 years and never felt deprived. When we were young we were saving about $1000/month and when we retired we were saving about $3100/month into our portfolio. I figure we saved about $800K over the 30 years. You can do the math, but if you assume a 6% return (we had a 65/35 equity/bond portfolio allocation) that after 30 years you get to about $2.6 million. We were very lucky in that we had new money to invest at the bottom of both the recent recessions so we ended up doing somewhat better. We both retired early (my wife at 40 and I retired at 56) or we could easily have more than doubled our retirement portfolio size. For us, a $50 million portfolio was probably out of reach, but realistically we could have made it to $10 million had we both kept working and retired at 66. But having those extra millions would not be an adequate trade off for the ten years of retirement we are enjoying now.

Getting into a habit of saving every month is important. It is my opinion, that you will not save as much over your life time if you wait until you have some amount, say $5k, before putting it into the market.

As to owning rentals, I think they can add to your portfolio as well. Our experience with rentals is as follows. We currently own one rental, which cost us $40K plus $160K mortgage. The rental is worth about $210K now and has a positive cash flow of about $400/month. In twenty five years when the mortgage is paid off, I expect the house will be worth about $420K (assuming its value increases with inflation - 3%). Assuming also that we can increase rents with inflation then in 25 years we will have been provided with about $300K in income and have a property worth about $420K. Getting $720K return on a $40K leveraged investment after 30 years is 10% rate of return (a crude estimate). Assuming our experience is typical, you would need to invest about $200K in five $200K rentals with $160K mortgages for 30 years to get to $50 million. So rentals could get you there.

When I look at your growth rates, it is my experience that you will not get that high of a return. I hope you get those growth rates because that will make your task easier. Finally, don't get discouraged. It is easy to get discouraged in the beginning because portfolios grow so slowly and some years your net worth will go down... but once on the path stay the course. I recall it taking us about 6 years to get to a $100K portfolio and another 6 to get to $500K.

To paraphrase a common saying on this board, there are many roads to... a net worth of $50 million. Don't think it is all real estate, all stocks, all business start-ups, or all whatever. Always take a diversified approach.

Best of luck on your journeyStats

Good post/advice. If you want to be comfortable be a boglehead the math works and avoid divorce at all cost! My thought if you want a shot to exceed $10M you need an extra ordinary capital event (inherence, sell business/stock, lottery, real estate etc. ) which requires a different direction (non bogle head approach ).

xiosen wrote:Thanks everyone for the amazing replies. This has been a very enlightening conversation.

Meg77 wrote:

xiosen wrote:I'm struggling currently because I don't have any specific goals for my next path to wealth, which I always assumed would include starting a business of some kind. Alternately you could create something (music, writings) that would generate royalties, and a website might be a blend of that plus manging a business. But I don't currently have any special skills or inspiration or free time currently to devote to that, so I'm going to focus on maximizing my current 2 buckets and accumulate cash to use for a future business when the mood/timing strikes. Of course in the meantime my career is an important source of fuel for these endeavors, so I should theoretically be focusing on it so that I can maximize my income so that I can have more cushion and investment opportunity.

How would you hypothetically free up time in the future to focus on business? If I were to pursue a similar path I would be a little concerned that the properties would or other endeavors would consume my life and not allow the time it takes to focus on a future business.

Well my job isn't too demanding and I've got my rentals under management so technically I have time now, but my boyfriend and I are planning to get engaged and married within the next year then buying a house and then probably having kids. So not a great time in life to launch a new business. But in 5-10 more years it may be, especially if I decide to quit my job when kids come - or even in 15-20 more years once the kids are older.

Chan_va wrote:If you are looking for higher scaling exponents, recognize the risk. And realize the extreme survivor ship bias in the data you see around you. You see business owners making $1M, but you don't see the 1000 that failed for every one that made it.

Do thousands fail for every one that makes it? That does not match the statistics I've seen. Most business owners eventually succeed. The published failure rate is on a per BUSINESS basis, not a per ENTREPRENEUR basis. Many business owners who fail the first time go on to succeed.

What makes you think that is true? All the data I have seen suggests otherwise - the success rate of a business started by someone who failed the first time is nearly identical to that of first time entrepreneurs. In other words, I don't think there is any reason to conclude that most business owners eventually succeed. Check out this research for example: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6045.html

You don't happen to have a copy of it that doesn't require us to register with morningstar, do you? I will register if you don't, just wondering.

Sorry, assumer, but I don't have a copy and I don't want to violate any Morningstar copyright. Perhaps you might want to get a "throwawy" email address to register if you're concerned about getting spam after registering.

My experience, both with our business and our personal finances, is that we are much better at forecasting and controlling expenses than we are at forecasting and controlling income. When all else fails, watch your expenditures. FWIW.

Chan_va wrote:If you are looking for higher scaling exponents, recognize the risk. And realize the extreme survivor ship bias in the data you see around you. You see business owners making $1M, but you don't see the 1000 that failed for every one that made it.

Do thousands fail for every one that makes it? That does not match the statistics I've seen. Most business owners eventually succeed. The published failure rate is on a per BUSINESS basis, not a per ENTREPRENEUR basis. Many business owners who fail the first time go on to succeed.

What makes you think that is true? All the data I have seen suggests otherwise - the success rate of a business started by someone who failed the first time is nearly identical to that of first time entrepreneurs. In other words, I don't think there is any reason to conclude that most business owners eventually succeed. Check out this research for example: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6045.html

Do the math. From your link, there's roughly an 80% chance of failure regardless of whether or not an entrepreneur has failed previously (if you segment the data more appropriately, you get a somewhat different picture but we'll ignore that). If previous failure doesn't make a difference(it does, even in the study you linked), they can rightly be described as independent, so we can easily calculate the point when the odds begin to tip in your favor. Again, assuming NO learning from your mistakes (which is unrealistic), there's only a 40% chance an entrepreneur would fail 4 times in a row. How many times does the average entrepreneur start a business over their lives? I'm not sure, but from the ones I know it's easily at least a dozen. And once you build one successful business, it's fairly easy to start another.

I won't go into the fact that the study you mentioned tracks venture-backed entrepreneurs specifically, which is unrepresentative of the broader entrepreneurial community. Venture-backed businesses are a completely different breed than your mom and pop dry cleaner or web business. What percentage of startups are venture-backed? It's very, very small.

xiosen wrote:Thanks everyone for the amazing replies. This has been a very enlightening conversation.

Meg77 wrote:

xiosen wrote:I'm struggling currently because I don't have any specific goals for my next path to wealth, which I always assumed would include starting a business of some kind. Alternately you could create something (music, writings) that would generate royalties, and a website might be a blend of that plus manging a business. But I don't currently have any special skills or inspiration or free time currently to devote to that, so I'm going to focus on maximizing my current 2 buckets and accumulate cash to use for a future business when the mood/timing strikes. Of course in the meantime my career is an important source of fuel for these endeavors, so I should theoretically be focusing on it so that I can maximize my income so that I can have more cushion and investment opportunity.

How would you hypothetically free up time in the future to focus on business? If I were to pursue a similar path I would be a little concerned that the properties would or other endeavors would consume my life and not allow the time it takes to focus on a future business.

This all feels like a Kiyosaki book somehow.

OP- What was line 38 on your 1040 last year? Try to make it bigger this year. That's how you get wealthy. It seems to me that most people trying to get ridiculously wealthy have salaries that are considered average at best. And people that are wealthy aren't necessarily trying. They're just doing something they love and trying to provide something for other people. Help yourself by helping others. Why was Steve Jobs rich? Because he made cool stuff to help the rest of us out.

Remember that studies show that money doesn't make you happier after about $75K a year. Having made less than that and more than that, I'd have to say that number is about right.

Chan_va wrote:If you are looking for higher scaling exponents, recognize the risk. And realize the extreme survivor ship bias in the data you see around you. You see business owners making $1M, but you don't see the 1000 that failed for every one that made it.

Do thousands fail for every one that makes it? That does not match the statistics I've seen. Most business owners eventually succeed. The published failure rate is on a per BUSINESS basis, not a per ENTREPRENEUR basis. Many business owners who fail the first time go on to succeed.

What makes you think that is true? All the data I have seen suggests otherwise - the success rate of a business started by someone who failed the first time is nearly identical to that of first time entrepreneurs. In other words, I don't think there is any reason to conclude that most business owners eventually succeed. Check out this research for example: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6045.html

Do the math. From your link, there's roughly an 80% chance of failure regardless of whether or not an entrepreneur has failed previously (if you segment the data more appropriately, you get a somewhat different picture but we'll ignore that). If previous failure doesn't make a difference(it does, even in the study you linked), they can rightly be described as independent, so we can easily calculate the point when the odds begin to tip in your favor. Again, assuming NO learning from your mistakes (which is unrealistic), there's only a 40% chance an entrepreneur would fail 4 times in a row. How many times does the average entrepreneur start a business over their lives? I'm not sure, but from the ones I know it's easily at least a dozen.

First, the evidence that entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes are also lacking (see for example the paper titled Repeat Entrepreneurship Following Business Closure) so you should be careful extrapolating from anecdotal observations on this. Second, what you are describing is essentially survivor bias - yes, if you try enough times and success is a factor of pure luck you will at some point be more likely to have one success than not - but most people who start businesses do not try it enough times - at least that is what the empirical evidence suggests (see for example the Kaufman Foundation's Anatomy of an Entrepreneur survey which found 84% had started 3 businesses or less, 67% 2 or less).

And once you build one successful business, it's fairly easy to start another.

Not according to the data - 30% success rate doesn't indicate what I would consider a fairly easy endeavor.

I won't go into the fact that the study you mentioned tracks venture-backed entrepreneurs specifically, which is unrepresentative of the broader entrepreneurial community. Venture-backed businesses are a completely different breed than your mom and pop dry cleaner or web business.

It is unrepresentative - but it has a higher success rate than non-venture backed businesses in general so if anything it should upward bias the success rate. As an aside, the best reasons I have seen for why this is the case is not something inherent in being venture-backed but that successfully obtaining venture backing is a signal of a more viable business.

EmergDoc wrote:OP- What was line 38 on your 1040 last year? Try to make it bigger this year. That's how you get wealthy. It seems to me that most people trying to get ridiculously wealthy have salaries that are considered average at best. And people that are wealthy aren't necessarily trying. They're just doing something they love and trying to provide something for other people. Help yourself by helping others. Why was Steve Jobs rich? Because he made cool stuff to help the rest of us out.

Remember that studies show that money doesn't make you happier after about $75K a year. Having made less than that and more than that, I'd have to say that number is about right.

The ridiculously wealthy in this conversation came in when I was asked was I talked about $2 mil or $50 mil. To me it was a number larger than what the typical citizen could save for retirement so a number larger than $2 mil. So I suggested to consider a larger sum and the best strategies to get there. Some people took the $50 mil figure literally and suggested opinions on how to get there. Realistically I am talking about what is the best strategies to obtain wealth via means other than saving for retirement. Ideas such as business, real estate, stock picking, and more risky investments that can yield more returns.

I never got into the reasons for wanting to be wealthy or philanthropy. Im interested in how does an average person like myself do better than the average retirement account. I want to excel and learn about different strategies whether it be real estate, stocks, business, a combination of all of them, etc that can build wealth (doesn't have to be strictly financial wealth) and stay true to the boglehead philosophy. I wanted to speak to people that have already done it, are doing it, or have read great books or other resources about it.

Last edited by xiosen on Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

xiosen wrote:I never got into the reasons for wanting to be wealthy or philanthropy. Im interested in how does an average person like myself do better than the average retirement account. I want to excel and learn about different strategies whether it be real estate, stocks, business, a combination of all of them, etc that can build wealth (doesn't have to be strictly financial wealth) and stay true to the boglehead philosophy. I wanted to speak to people that have already done it, are doing it, or have read great books or other resources about it.

I made (am making) a lot of money in small businesses, but simply following the boglehead philosophy puts you WAY above average. If you want to do "more" than that (small business, real estate, etc), you MUST take more risk. Despite what other people say, this is real risk. You may end up WORSE than average.

avalpert wrote:First, the evidence that entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes are also lacking (see for example the paper titled Repeat Entrepreneurship Following Business Closure) so you should be careful extrapolating from anecdotal observations on this. Second, what you are describing is essentially survivor bias - yes, if you try enough times and success is a factor of pure luck you will at some point be more likely to have one success than not - but most people who start businesses do not try it enough times - at least that is what the empirical evidence suggests (see for example the Kaufman Foundation's Anatomy of an Entrepreneur survey which found 84% had started 3 businesses or less, 67% 2 or less).

It's not survivorship bias because I'm including everybody: those who eventually succeeded and those who didn't. Lack of evidence isn't the same thing as evidence of lack. I've read the particular paper you mentioned. It doesn't conclude there is no empirical evidence for learning in failure, just that the contemporary literature is inconsistent. Furthermore, this study doesn't even track 2nd or 3rd businesses by those involved. It merely interviews people who started ONE business and concluding there's no evidence their experience would help them start a second business. Well of course there isn't! They hadn't started one yet. Saying there's no evidence for something isn't the same as saying there's evidence against something.

There are also likely to be differences in success rates amongst people who start multiple businesses in the same industry and multiple businesses in different industries. I've started multiple businesses in the same industry and I can assure you, you learn a lot from the failures. It's just like anything else: practice makes perfect.

avalpert wrote: It is unrepresentative - but it has a higher success rate than non-venture backed businesses in general so if anything it should upward bias the success rate. As an aside, the best reasons I have seen for why this is the case is not something inherent in being venture-backed but that successfully obtaining venture backing is a signal of a more viable business.

No, being venture-backed is just a signal that you're in an industry requiring a lot of capital to operate. Plenty of industries aren't like that and in those industries, even the very best businesses wouldn't be venture-funded because there would be no advantage in doing so.

You have been given some good advice! Regarding the work you do to earn money…remember to do it with passion. And remember to read stuff that inspires you. For instance, I like the following quotes:

1. Learn to live on less money and have more fun. Life will go by anyway, whether you enjoy it or not. -- Unknown

2. The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what we want most for what we want at the moment. -- Unknown

3. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world if full educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. -- (John) Calvin Coolidge (Please read my note on this quote, which is below.

4. Happiness is strange; it comes when you are no longer seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, you become happy. -- Unknown

5. Things are not what they seem. Always seek the impossible, which is never more than a step away. Take the first step: Come back to Now. The next step will be revealed. - From the book "A Rich Man's Secret" by Ken Roberts.

Best wishes,

Frank R. Cirullo

Important note - Travelight is probably correct about the author of one of the quotes above, so I have changed the author of it from Unknown to (John) Calvin Coolidge. Thank you, Travelight! Also, the following is probably the complete quote. If you disagree, please let me know:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- (John) Calvin Coolidge. Read more: http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/3186#ixzz2OTgPJs5V

Edited on 03/24/2013 to change the author of a quote from Unknown to (John) Calvin Coolidge. Edited on 03/23/2013 to correct two typographical errors.

Last edited by fcirullo on Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Frank R. Cirullo
|
| "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." --
| Will Rogers

I already responsed to this in a long drawn out post, but in a nutshell the way everyone builds wealth is to pay yourself first. Nothing new and very boring, but this is the most important thing to do.

One thing that's been overlooked so far is individual talent. Artistic, technical, musical, writing, etc. There are routes to fame and fortune for those who have and can effectively develop and market their own talent. But the odds of amassing $50M in a lifetime aren't good in any field, else we would see many of our neighbors having achieved such wealth. A whole lot of very talented and intelligent and hardworking people have no hope of reaching such a wealth target, and most have never dreamed of achieving it. They're happy being "successful" and "having a family," and "getting by," not maximizing their wealth. Or they settle into career tracks that are comfortable and give them a lot of personal satisfaction and security but won't make them rich. For example, in my career (in academia) I've only met a couple of $50M+ types -- and they were in other parts of the economy, e.g., real estate development. None of my friends or colleagues fall into that group. But they're doing reasonably well financially, and by end of career can retire comfortably.

To say your goal is to "create" businesses doesn't say a lot about how you would turn your business into real money, e.g., by developing patentable ideas that you sell for significant profit, by leveraging your own capital (bringing in investors, borrowing money), to develop and market products, and so on. You need to be able to develop not only ideas but also business plans. I'm not necessarily talking Google or Apple or Facebook or Group-on. But you often need capital to make capital.

3. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world if full educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. - Unknown

That is one of my favorites, fcirullo. I had always thought it was attributed to Calvin Coolidge.

stemikger wrote:I already responsed to this in a long drawn out post, but in a nutshell the way everyone builds wealth is to pay yourself first. Nothing new and very boring, but this is the most important thing to do.

Great summary^

I enjoyed this thread as well as the quotes provided by Steve.

Ill say, love what you do, and then live on less then it pays. Invest the rest wisely and you'll be there.

I have been coming here for a few years and I been reading about how some others have been building wealth. I am wondering how their plans mesh with the boglehead world. Basically they suggest doing a mix of the following:

Note: once you get to the higher growth rates (i.e. stocks, real-estate, and business) in the table above, it is assumed that you will use leverage (i.e. other people's money and time) and actively manage them to increase your returns to the indicative levels.

I am basically in the process of doing this and I am wondering what is the best boglehead way of doing it. I already have some liquid savings in a high interest savings / cds. I also have been maxing out my IRA and investing all other extra income into vanguard according to the core 4 portfolio. I also am a web developer so I actively try to build new business ideas and am going to focus more on that in 2013 versus maintaining my existing service based one since it can't really be sold or grown any further.

Moving forward I want to try to build some real wealth in every way that I can. I am currently renting so the next step is to purchase a house that I can easily afford that can potentially be turned into a rental later. I may continue renting however as we are considering moving to another country when a job opportunity for my girlfriend presents itself. However the concept remains the same in that we would purchase a home to live in. I was also considering investing around $5k into stocks once my next business creates this profit (would represent about 3.8% of my current assets and investments, im 27) as more of a challenge to learn more about it and how I can grow it. At the end if it is not for me then I would withdraw what I have left. At the same time if I excel at it I would continue to grow it while not adding any more additional funds as this would mainly be to satisfy the urge to learn and not compromise the rest of my investment strategy.

I start to get confused toward the real-estate path. Assuming I have extra income each year I debate whether or not if that conflicts with putting it all in index funds or a mix between real-estate and index funds. For example if I took the real estate path I would save up 20% down payment (20-25k where I am at) to purchase a second home (assuming I am living in one now) and rent out one of them. I could then repeat the process or instead try to pay down each home before purchasing the next. Assume I also save up an emergency fund to cover vacancies, maintenance, etc.

So my question to you is, what is the most boglehead way to build wealth to maximize the growth rate to be as high as possible as well as diversifying in the process. I plan on working forever and always creating business' and I want to put all the money I earn to work to create true wealth. I am mainly interested in a plan to do it and at what point financially I should focus on each. At 27 I can afford to experiment more and I am happy with my existing portfolio. I hope to have a good 40 years to put this plan into action.

Im also open to any links or books that covers these topics that you have enjoyed (aside from bogleheads guide to investing as I need to re-read that again).

The expected return rates are just not correct. For example, how can the expected return for stocks be higher than an index funds, which are just a diversified collection of stocks? The higher expected returns are even less realistic.

Remember that expected returns are what is need, not maximum possible returns, otherwise, youare just gambling.

I would suggest more reading. Perhaps others can suggest some good references which show realistic numbers.

leo383 wrote:I guess it all depends on what you mean by "real wealth".

If you want to end up with $2 million you should do very different things than if you want to end up with $50 million.

I suppose in this discussion, real wealth would be the 50 million or highest possible. Assuming that I also contribute money to comfortable retire ($2 million for example), the goal would be to amass as much wealth as possible. Im not really getting into the reasons for amassing wealth or what to do with it, but mainly strategies on how to get there.

I realize the $50 million would have to come with a lot of luck (facebook), but mainly looking at strategies on how someone would build wealth that could be as simple as make money and put it into your AA but I see others mentioning larger risks, returns with other strategies and I am looking to discuss what those would be and at what point to execute them in the best boglehead-ish way.

If you want to have $50m you either work in a truly well remunerated industry (hedge fund, private equity etc.) or you found your own company and succeed.

On that latter, you don't want to strip out precious cash and put it into anything as dull as a Vanguard fund.

No, the Internal Rate of Return of cash invested in the early stages of your own ventures will be huge.

I invested heavily in myself (education). Then I made a number of bets on businesses until I finally managed to sell one that allowed me to buy my house outright and put me near retirement level. I'm 41.

This was pretty stressful and I would only recommend it if you are in your 20's and have plenty of energy and drive to pursue this path. It's not for the faint-of-heart but the payoff is huge if you can stick with it. The more usual (and sane) way is to accumulate wealth slowly and have a steady retirement. Safe and steady, although you probably won't end up "wealthy".

In any case, the strategy you take to attain wealth is definitely not the same strategy you should follow to preserve it.

Well done you!

Your challenge now will be to live a good and fulfilling life with the 30, 40, 50 years hopefully you have left.

I know too many people who cashed out of the City (ie Wall Street, in London terms) at 45 or 50 with say £5-10m, and are drinking away their livers in retirement.

Love the entire quote, fcirullo! It struck me first time I laid eyes on it and I tore it out of the newspaper and pinned it on my bulletin board.

A funny side story.... just this Friday, I walked into the break room at work and everyone was in there at lunch time. One of the colleagues turned around and said "oh, travellight! we were all just talking about how smart you are! we don't know how you do it all". (crazy but true story, lol) I went on to "own" my smartness and regaled them with several long stories pertinent to it. At the end of it all, she said something about how I got through and did everything to get to where I am. I then said, "oh that?!!! that didn't take smarts, that was sheer drive and persistence. Nose to the grindstone, never gave up; that's all it takes."

Getting rich doesn't equate to working your butt off, persisting (beating your head against the wall), or any of that. Those are sometimes necessary but there are lots of people who do those things and they don't get rich.

To get really rich you need something that can be leveraged. I'm not necessarily talking about borrowing money to invest.

Leverage is a plumber who starts out working out of his truck. Things go well, he buys another truck and hires a plumber to work the truck. Then another truck and another. Now he has ten trucks with plumbers working each truck. He is getting rich. He is in a business that can be leveraged.

A Doctor does the same thing when he opens a group and hire other doctors to see patients. The Doc doesn't even see patients anymore, he manages the practice. Dentists hire two or three hygienists to do cleanings. A CPA hires staff CPAs and take on more jobs. That's leverage. That's how you get rich.

You can only make so much money doing everything yourself. So think up a business that you can leverage. It doesn't have to be a complicated high tech business. Start small. Keep your initial investment low to limit your risk. If you fail you don't lose all. If you have success, expand. More success? Expand more.

If you find something that works keep doing it.

I've seen comments here such as "Now that I've had some success in my business I'm looking for a new business." Why are you doing that? Why not keep cranking the money tree you have? Crank it faster, bigger, better.

If you are making extra money then save some of it and use Vanguard Index funds. That's your pile.

You don't have to invent the cure for cancer, fixing pipes can make you rich. Garbage trucks can make you rich. I've known smart guys who own garbage hauling businesses and they live in the swankiest neighborhoods in town. They know how to use leverage. They have a bunch of garbage trucks and routes.

Think like a businessman.

“Gold gets dug out of the ground, then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility.”--Warren Buffett